“People don’t eat those,” replied Hall.
“Why not?” asked Bertram.
“Try it and see,” was the response.
Bertram did, and desisted not until his teeth ached and he feared to break them. There was certainly no fear of breaking the biscuit. Was it a sort of practical joke biscuit—a rather clever imitation of a biscuit in concrete, hardwood, or pottery-ware of some kind?
“I understand why people do not eat them,” he admitted.
“Can’t be done,” said Hall. “Why, even the Kavirondo who eat live slugs, dead snakes, uncooked rice, raw flesh or rotten flesh and any part of any animal there is, do not regard those things as food. . . . They make ornaments of them, tools, weapons, missiles, all sorts of things. . . .”
“I suppose if one were really starving one could live on them for a time,” said the honest and serious-minded Bertram, ever a seeker after truth.
“Not unless one could get them into one’s stomach, I suppose,” was the reply; “and I don’t see how one would do it. . . . I was reduced to trying once, and I tried hard. I put one in a basin and poured boiling water on it. . . . No result whatever. . . . I left it to soak for an hour while I chewed and chewed a piece of bully-beef. . . . Result? . . . It was slightly darker in colour, but I could no more bite into it than I could into a tile or a book. . . .”
“Suppose you boiled one,” suggested Bertram.
“Precisely what I did,” said Hall, “for my blood was up, apart from the fact that I was starving. It was a case of Hall versus a Biscuit. I boiled it—or rather watched the cook boil it in a chattie. . . . I gave it an hour. At the end of the hour it was of a slightly still darker colour—and showed signs of splitting through the middle. But never a bit could I get off it. . . . ‘Boil the dam’ thing all day and all night, and give it me hot for breakfast,’ said I to the cook. . . . As one who patiently humours the headstrong, wilful White Man, he went away to carry on the foolish struggle. . . .”